Addendum to Lessons Learned

Stuff that are most often taken for granted but are important nonetheless to survive hackintoshing:

1) Know how to interrupt Darwin, the bootloader (as if you didn’t know it’s a bootloader, hey? Just wanted to clear out that that’s not my boyfriend’s name or something ;))

> by default, you’ve got a five second countdown before OS X actually starts booting up. During that time, hit any key on your keyboard and you’ll get to the boot prompt.

2) Know your flags! United Nations member countries not included – haha, so not funny and a desperate attempt at humor.

“-v” : verbose mode – OS X normally uses graphical boot mode, so you get that screen with a grey apple and a spinning wheel at the bottom. But with verbose mode, you only get text flashing across your screen – especially useful when you want to see what’s going on as OS X boots up for problem diagnosis.

“-f” : not exactly sure that this mode’s officially called but I use it to force OS X to load kexts. Sometimes it happens that you’ve installed a kext alright but it isn’t recognized by the system, you just gotta make OS X to load it against its will.

“-x“: safe boot mode – when the system refuses to boot properly and you wanna go in fix stuff but want to do so in GUI, this would be the way to go.

“-s” : single user mode – when all else fails, use this. It’ll boot up the system in command line mode and this is the time when you need to…

3) Know your Terminal commands – I’m a total noob when it comes to Mac OS X but I’ve been dabbling with Linux for quite sometime now, being weened on Mandrake Linux run computer labs in college (I studied in a state university, which, for a third world country, means no sufficient funds coming in from the government, hence the need to go open source), I’ve a fairly good amount of basic bash knowledge. And OS X being Unix essentially underneath the glossy Aqua exteriors, that knowledge has proven to be indispensible.

Here are some basic commands I find myself using time and again:

“sudo passwd root” : for enabling and creating a password for the root account (super user)

“/sbin/fsck -fy” : for making modifications to the files in your OS X drive. followed by:

“sudo cp </path-to-file-to-be-copied></path-to-destination-directotry-or-location/>” : for copying a file to a new directory or, in Mac parlance, location.

“sudo cp -R</path-to-directory-to-be-copied></path-to-destination-directotry-or-location/>” : for copying whole directories or folders to a new location. Again, this works for kexts.

“exit” : to go out of Terminal/command line mode and continue booting into GUI mode.

“reboot” : reboots computer.

4) Know your paths/locations – clearly this is important, or coupled with the commands above, you could potentially screw up your hackintosh even to the point of no redeem but a fresh re-install.

“/” : this is the main directory, sometimes also calle “root” directory; I prefer calling it “main directory” as “root directory” can be confused with the “root user”.

“/System/Library/Extensions/” : where all your kexts reside. By the way, kexts are called “kexts” because the word actually stands for Kernel Extension.

“/System/Library/Extensions.mkext” : this is deleted along with

“/System/Library/Extensions/Caches/” when you want to clear your extensions cache manually; i.e. Kext Helper is doing a crappy job at it.

And finally as an example, here’s what happened to me last night when after getting tired of playing mp3’s on iTunes and leeching off of a neighbor’s unsecure wireless network, I succumbed to the temptation of experimenting with my poor unsuspecting Extensions folder.

I wanted to see if that Natit.kext I installed along with my video kexts was really necessary. So I:

10) interrupted Darwin again and this time forced loaded the kexts via the -f flag.

11) still getting the “blue screen of comatose” so I forced shut the mini and rebooted again into single user mode.

12) ran the “/sbin” commands again to mount and be able to modify the contents of my hard drive.

13) sudo rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelGMA950.kext then Enter,waited till I got back to the prompt.

14) sudo rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelIntegratedFrameBuffer.kext then Enter,waited till I got back to the prompt.

15) reboot then Enter and waited till machine rebooted and let it boot into OS X. As a result of my deleting the AppleIntelGMA950 and AppleIntegratedFrameBuffer kexts, I had squashed 600 x 480 resolution but I was able to get past that despicable “blue screen of comatose” and into my desktop.

16) reinstalled the AppleIntelGMA950 and AppleIntegratedFrameBuffer kexts with Kext Helper b7, rebooted as prompted – but I still force loaded the kexts just to be sure OS X recognizes them and my 1024 x 600 resolution was restored.

Note: when you type the path, you can just type the first letters and just hit Tab and the rest of the name will be put it automatically. Ex: you can just go “/Sys<Tab>/Lib<Tab>/Ext<Tab>/” and you’ll end up with “/System/Library/Extensions/” anyway instead of manually typing the whole “/System/Library/Extensions/” path name.

Tab key is also useful for when you don’t know the exact name of a kext, but you know the first part,

Ex.: “sudo rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelGMA<you don’t know what comes next>”, hit Tab key and you’ll get a list of all files within/System/Library/Extensions/ that start with “AppleIntelGMA*”.

please I’m running hp mini 1035nr with OS X 10.5.8 leopard,
I’m new to this and i installed the AppleIntelGMA950.kext and
AppleIntelIntegratedFrameBuffer.kext. now my display is is gone … now all i get is a light grey screen with horizontal lines through it but i still can see my mouse pointer????? how can i fix this?????????
please i need help asap been working on this net-book for 3 weeks now.
please reply 8bitgeekpro@gmail.com this way i could get a faster reply on to a solution on how to fix this issue!!!!
thank you

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